The Long Road to My First Real Orgasm

How I went from feeling broken to finally understanding my body

image by Andrés Gómez

For a long time, I genuinely believed I was one of those women who just couldn’t come.

Not “hasn’t figured it out yet.” Not “needs the right partner.” Just… broken. Wired differently. A woman whose body somehow missed the memo that pleasure was supposed to feel effortless.

I carried that belief with me through most of my twenties.

Sex could be enjoyable. It could be intimate. Sometimes it was exciting. I loved being desired. I loved the anticipation of a hand sliding across my skin, the feeling of someone’s attention completely focused on me, the warmth of being wanted. But no matter how good it felt in the moment, there was always something missing.

Everyone talked about orgasms like they were inevitable.

Friends swapped stories about mind-blowing nights and earth-shattering pleasure. Movies made it look effortless. The internet made it seem like every woman was having multiple orgasms before breakfast.

Meanwhile, I was lying awake afterward, wondering what everyone else seemed to know that I didn’t.

Was I doing something wrong?

Was my body different?

Was I simply never going to experience the thing everyone else talked about so casually?

Those questions followed me for years.

The worst part wasn’t missing the orgasm itself. It was the quiet feeling that something inside me wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. That maybe everyone else had been handed a map to pleasure, and I’d somehow been left behind.

I kept that belief tucked away like a shameful little secret while everyone around me seemed to be having wild, unforgettable nights. And there I was, smiling, nodding along, pretending I understood exactly what they were talking about.

I had no idea that everything I believed about my body was wrong.

This is the story of how all of that changed.

The 20s Lie I Told Myself

When I started having sex, I had no idea what I was doing. I was young, curious, fumbling through it all with my boyfriend, and honestly? I thought sex ending when he came was just how sex worked.

He orgasms. That’s the end. We’re done.

And that was pretty much my entire sexual script for the better part of a decade.

I’d hear girls talk about coming 20-something times in one night, and I’d sit there thinking, I can’t even come once. I never said it out loud. I just smiled and assumed I was different. That my body simply didn’t do that. That was the way things were, and I had to accept it.

So I did. Or I tried to.

The First Time I Actually Touched Myself

Here’s the thing about masturbation: I avoided it for years. Not because I thought it was wrong or shameful. I just genuinely didn’t believe my own hands could offer anything worth discovering. How much pleasure could I really pull from my own body? I had no idea.

I was 25 the first time I really masturbated.

Twenty-five.

Looking back now, that number still surprises me.

It started in the shower with the showerhead, and I remember thinking, oh my God. Oh my GOD. How have I been missing this my whole life?

Something cracked open in me that day. All this time, I thought I was incapable of pleasure, and here I was, coming in my own shower, alone, without anyone’s help.

When that long-term relationship ended, the one where sex had always felt one-sided and incomplete, I was finally alone. And instead of feeling lost, I felt electric. I bought some toys. I used my imagination. I explored. Slowly, patiently, I started getting to know my own body in a way I never had before.

It turned out my body was working perfectly fine all along. I just hadn’t been paying attention.

The Psychological Wall

Even after I started coming on my own, doing it with a partner was a whole different story.

Guys would go down on me, really try, and I’d be lying there with a running commentary in my head. He’s going to get tired. I’m going to get tired. This is going to end in that weird suspended disappointment where nobody wins, and nobody says a word about it.

So I’d cut it short. It’s okay, baby, don’t worry about it. Let’s just do you.

And yeah, I faked it more than once. I know. But in the moment, it felt like the kindest exit, for both of us. End the tension. Make him feel good. Move on.

One time, a guy called me out on it. Said he didn’t feel the pulsing, the tightening he expected. I told him I definitely came. He looked at me. We didn’t talk about it again.

The block wasn’t just physical. It lived somewhere deeper, a quiet voice that had decided this particular pleasure wasn’t mine to have.

The Man Who Actually Changed Everything

And then there was Gab.

I’d been with men before who treated my body like a puzzle they were determined to solve. Who announced, with a kind of competitive energy, that they were going to be the ones to finally make me come. That pressure is the least sexy thing in the world. It turns intimacy into a performance and your body into a problem.

Gab didn’t do any of that.

When I told him it was hard for me, he didn’t flinch or get strategic about it. He simply looked at me with this quiet, steady warmth and said, " Okay, challenge accepted, I don’t care if it takes three hours.

And something about the way he said it made me exhale.

There was no urgency. No scorekeeping. Just his hands, his patience, and a tenderness that felt less like technique and more like devotion. He made me feel like my pleasure mattered not as a conquest but as something genuinely worth his time and attention.

I felt safe. And safety, it turns out, is the most underrated ingredient in truly good sex.

It was his hands the first time. It took around 30 minutes. And when it finally happened, I was stunned. Not just by the sensation but by the realization that my body had been capable of this all along, just waiting for the right conditions to bloom.

Every time after that, it got a little easier. I started learning the language of my own arousal. The tension in my legs. The angle of my hips. The way my breathing needed to shift. It became something we figured out together, a slow, gorgeous collaboration between his hands and my body and whatever magic lives in the space between trust and desire.

Learning to Come on Top

Once I understood what my body was capable of, I wanted to go deeper into it.

Coming on top of him became one of my favourite things in the world. That particular kind of control, the freedom to move exactly as I needed, to find the angle that made everything inside me go quiet and then suddenly very, very loud. Clitoral stimulation is where it’s at for me. That’s the place where everything converges, where sensation builds into something that takes over my whole body.

And coming on his mouth? I started doing that last year, and fuck, it feels so good. There’s something about it that requires a complete surrender. You have to let go of every thought, every self-conscious flicker, every urge to manage the moment. You just have to feel.

That surrender, I’ve learned, is the whole point.

On Multiple Orgasms and What They Actually Feel Like

I’ve managed to come twice in a session a handful of times, usually in different ways. Once on top, and then again with his fingers or his mouth. They don’t repeat so much as they layer, each one different in texture and depth.

As for squirting, I know there’s a debate about whether it counts as an orgasm. For me, personally, it absolutely does. The sensation moves through my entire body like a wave that won’t stop. It’s overwhelming and consuming, and I’m calling it exactly what it feels like: an orgasm.

I’m not chasing 17 orgasms a night. That’s not where I am, and I don’t need it to be. Coming once, fully, with my whole self present and open, is something I once thought was completely impossible for me. Now it’s just part of who I am.

What I Wish I’d Known Sooner

The truth is, I could have been having orgasms years earlier if I had simply known my own body better.

Not because I was with the wrong people, but because I didn’t know what to ask for. I didn’t know how to name my own desire. I didn’t understand that I needed to be an active, curious, unapologetic participant in my own pleasure rather than a passive passenger hoping something good might happen to me.

Self-knowledge is everything. Masturbation is everything. Not as a replacement for intimacy but as the foundation of it. You can’t ask someone else to navigate a landscape you’ve never explored yourself.

And finding a partner whose patience feels like warmth rather than obligation? That changes the whole equation. Not because you can only come with one specific person, but because feeling truly safe removes the noise long enough for your body to finally do what it has always known how to do.

If you’re in the place I used to be, quietly carrying the belief that orgasms just aren’t your thing, that your body is the exception, that everyone else got something you were simply never given, I want you to hear this.

I spent most of my 20s completely convinced I was, and I was so, so wrong.

Your body knows exactly what it’s doing. It has always been known. Sometimes it just needs you to slow down, get curious, and give it the grace and space to finally show you what it’s been holding for you all along.

Thank you for reading 🌸

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